chrstphrbnntt

I, too, have had success with my own variation of the "metal for non-metal people" compilation. Record store owners here don't seem to mind me slipping them inbetween some Black Sabbath LPs or Opeth CDs. It's very effective; seems like all of the Gorgoroth and Darkthrone albums are getting snatched up a lot faster since I started, and I've received many emails about the CD-Rs since starting.

Not everyone that hears a few great metal songs will have some sort of epiphanic reaction, but putting this stuff out there is important.

at his request, i recently made my friend in Germany a sampler of 2nd wave black metal bands. he seems quite the intellectual type, and not of metal background... so i hope i didn't turn him off by picking the wrong stuff. but on the other hand it doesn't really matter. black metal is not really about including people. but if it were i guess it would benefit more from these sort of people than suburban metalhead kids..

I had something similar happen with the death metal around 1998. Someone wanted to get into it, asked for the latest and greatest. It was hard to compile because so little was enduring. I ended up making a second dub and giving it to him a week later, saying something like "It isn't the latest, but it's the immortal in death metal." He still uses it to work out to.

Heh. I have done this myself, although I simply just left some CDs in front of kid's houses. I never did learn about the fruits of my efforts. I was 18 when I did this, and I graduated and left soon after. I should pick this back up, especially in this here Dave Matthew's city.

I remember getting one guy interested into black metal by playing the Transilvanian Hunger riff (you know which one) on the piano to him. He liked what he heard so I burned him a copy of Transilvanian Hunger. Sadly, he didn't enjoy the album. He understands that there's beauty behind the "ugly" aesthetic, but he still doesn't feel like digging through all the noise.

I'll guess I'd have to use something that's more easy on the ears. Any suggestions? Sacramentum, maybe?

I've got one convert under my belt. A brilliant young kid i met sometime back in 2004. Back then, he was a christian and drug-addict, failing out of school and completely screwed up on pcp/crystal meth.

I started hanging around him, gave him several CD-R's of just little compilations i'd made. After a little while and lots of black/death metal, he's supporting his favorite bands (Gorgoroth, Darkthrone, Immortal, etc.) and currently working to put himself through college.

Kind of funny when you think of most stereotypes of the corruptive nature of this music. I think metal was a large part of his decisions to go foreward and clean himself up.

I had something similar happen with the death metal around 1998. Someone wanted to get into it, asked for the latest and greatest. It was hard to compile because so little was enduring. I ended up making a second dub and giving it to him a week later, saying something like "It isn't the latest, but it's the immortal in death metal." He still uses it to work out to.

This post got me thinking about something: Do many people work out to Death Metal?

Here's the updated text that I'll be using for local implantation, in case anyone's interested; I simply cleaned up some of the grammar/language, trying to make its message clearer and more rhetorical:

Quote

Underground Metal

for non-metal people

Active most prominently from 1983-1993, underground metal—comprised of equal parts hardcore punk, heavy metal, progressive rock, and industrial—formed a subculture that, in contrast to most artistic movements, resisted the concept of modern society. Explicitly Romantic in its leanings, it idealized heroism, nature, and the wistful realism of mortality.

As with the majority art forms derived from heavy metal music, most underground metal is Nietzschean in its acceptance of the means of power as beyond mortal, and through its worship of what is powerful, creates thunderous, foreboding sound. Using the powers of distortion (and other means of electronic manipulation), heavy metal took rock music into new dimensions; its power chords are at home in all keys and modalities, and thus, lend themselves to composition in melodic phrases, creating a narrative type of song-structure that evokes some of the songwriting models prevalent in classical music and the ancient Greek modes.

Death metal asserts that “only death is real,” reminding us that, whatever our moral or financial pretense, life has inherent limitations, and thus, we must find meaning in how we spend our time—we must find higher ideals than keeping up with Family Guy quotes and Dane Cook jokes. Black metal took this concept further with its praise of the “evil,” “amoral,” anti-Judeo-Christian nature of Paganism. Both genres, like German philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), criticize modern society for creating a fantasy world of morality, money, popularity, and equality, in which the finer aspects of nature and humanity go unrecognized. In this music, then, we hope that our listeners find some connection to that world which society continues to deny: the world where only death is real.